With the development of e-commerce websites, an increasing amount of merchandise transactions is moving from offline to online. E-commerce platforms provide sellers with information for publishing and display and the e-commerce platform provides buyers with information for reviewing and acquiring merchandise. The common e-commerce platforms typically provide buyers with search services for finding merchandise to be purchased. Typically, the e-commerce platforms also provide a search engine to serve as an information-acquiring tool for the buyers. For example, by searching for “mobile phones,” users are able to view merchandise and merchants that are on the e-commerce platform. Among the found merchandise, the users identify merchandise to be purchased. Therefore, the platforms establish bridges for communication of information between the buyers and the sellers or, similarly, publishers and inquirers.
However, in some cases, because of a mismatch in buyer-seller information or asymmetries in fields of knowledge, the manner in which a seller expresses their information does not conform to the search habits of buyers. As a result, some users are unable to find a desired product, even though the product is accurately and reasonably exhibited for users desiring the products. Also, the seller loses out on a potential sale and the seller loses a target customer. Trying to make the buyer understand the ways in which the seller describes their products is unreasonable, or vice versa. In addition, when the seller, as a producer or provider of proxy services, introduce a new product or service, the buyer often lacks the relevant experience or knowledge to understand the description of the new product or service. As a result, the product or service cannot be reasonably and effectively described to the buyer, leading to added communication and connection costs between the buyer and the seller and to losses on both the buyer and the seller.
To reduce the losses, search engines typically reduce to the greatest extent possible the dissatisfaction caused by buyer-seller information mismatch by expanding user query terms. Therefore, a query term expansion technique is one means of reducing the buyer-seller information mismatch. However, the means that are currently employed to reduce buyer-seller information mismatches are typically from the buyer's viewpoint. Large volumes of buyer search logs from website platforms using query terms previously searched by users in these search logs are collected as data sets. Through clustering and other such methods, the user query terms are expanded. These user query terms are gathered from searches performed by other users who purchased similar products. This approach can, to a certain extent, reduce the one-sidedness of some buyer search phrases, and can increase information matching and user experience.
Some of the limitations with such a scheme include: the scheme is still one-sided although the scheme considers the behavior of a certain volume of buyers and reduces some of the one-sidedness of searching by some users; information expansion falls short, in terms of both richness and satisfaction; becoming aware of the appearance of new search phrases is very difficult because the scheme relies solely on buyer information, i.e., the terms used in searches by specific customer groups at a website; information mismatching problems exist; and websites typically use user search phrase statistics and then form expanded term recommendation lists based on clustering correlations and other such means. However, the websites still often find presenting good recommendation results, in the case of new merchandise or of merchandise that has gained sudden popularity, to be difficult. In addition, the websites are usually unable to reduce buyer-seller information mismatches. Where asymmetries of professional knowledge exist, the descriptive methods of sellers sometimes do not match buyers. As a consequence, some seller information and merchandise fail to be well exhibited within searches, and the asymmetries of professional knowledge adversely affect the experiences and benefits of website users, both buyers and sellers. The situation for publishers and inquirers is also similar.